Monsoon storms and floods kill many in India and Bangladesh
Created: 2022-06-20 11:26 am
Bangladesh, Sylhet: The recent heavy monsoon rains in parts of Bangladesh and neighboring India have led to major flooding.
Authorities are struggling to bring drinking water and dry food to the flooded areas.
© Mahmud Hossain Opu/AP/dpa +++ dpa picture radio +++
The worst monsoon floods in years occurred in Bangladesh and neighboring India.
More than 60 people died - weather experts predict more rain for the next few days.
Dhaka - These are the worst monsoon floods in Bangladesh and India in many years.
In total, more than 60 people have died and millions have had to leave their homes.
The danger is not over yet.
It is monsoon season in these countries and more heavy rains are forecast.
Authorities are struggling to bring drinking water and dry food to the flooded areas.
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So far, more than 60 people have died in Bangladesh and India as a result of monsoon storms and the subsequent severe flooding, and millions are homeless.
The
Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS)
news agency spoke of six million refugees on Saturday.
Rivers burst their banks within a short time and entire villages had to be evacuated, according to the authorities.
One of Asia's largest rivers, the Brahmaputra, breached its levees and flooded 3,000 villages and crops in India.
"The amount of precipitation is unprecedented," said an employee of the meteorological station in Gauhati, the capital of the Indian state of Assam, as reported by the
daily
news.
According to the authorities, 21 people died in Bangladesh from lightning strikes alone.
After days of continuous rain, large parts of the north-east of the country are flooded.
In Sylhet, the capital of the hardest-hit region of the same name, the third largest airport in the South Asian country had to shut down operations.
According to the weather forecasts, the situation is likely to deteriorate further.
According to a
CNN
report on Monday, heavy rain is forecast for the next 24 hours.
The four months from June to September are known as the monsoon season in South Asia, and around 80 percent of the annual precipitation falls.
People die at this time every year.
However, experts assume that without the monsoon rains, there would be high crop failures and famine because agriculture could not be adequately irrigated.
However, long-term weather data show that climate change is apparently increasing monsoon rains, as shown by a study by Tianjun Zhou and Wenxia Zhang from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing published in the Journal of Climate in 2019.
Bangladesh, Sylhet: Two women stand in a flooded house.
The recent heavy monsoon rains in parts of Bangladesh and neighboring India have led to major flooding.
© Mahmud Hossain Opu/AP/dpa +++ dpa picture radio +++
Monsoons in India and Bangladesh: what the global climate crisis has to do with it
The city of Chittagong in Bangladesh, with a population of around five million, has been particularly hard hit by the floods.
The country's second largest city sits on the coast of the Bay of Bengal and just above sea level.
Local media reports that large parts of the metropolis are knee-deep in water.
As a result of climate change, the sea level has already risen by 15 centimeters in the 20th century, as reported by the German Climate Consortium (DKK) - and the trend is rising.
According to a special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the sea level is rising by around 3.6 millimeters per year.
The relatively flat Bangladesh is generally very low.
If global warming continues at the current rate, almost 30 million of Bangladesh's 160 million inhabitants will have to be relocated within the next ten years.
This is announced by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
According to experts, the number and extent of disasters caused by climate change will continue to increase in the future.
(dpa/AFP/bm).
